Smitty: Can't Go Wrong

This four-panel strip follows Smitty's misadventure with bread pudding—a comic sequence built on visual gags and sequential cause-and-effect. The strip demonstrates the newspaper comic's core mechanics: recurring character, domestic humor, panel progression that builds from setup to punchline, and speech balloons that anchor personality and timing. Smitty exemplified the daily strip format that dominated American newspapers and established the visual grammar later inherited by comic books: panel borders framing action, expressive linework, and the interplay of image and text that defined twentieth-century sequential art.